Broken hearts are real, and these researchers measured the risk

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The scene is almost a cliché — a middle-aged man dies of an unexpected heart attack, and his grieving widow ends up in the hospital herself within a week.

It turns out it’s also a realistic picture of precisely what can happen when you lose a loved one.

“The elevated risk was especially high for those who were young and those who lost a relatively healthy partner,” Dr. Simon Graff of Aarhus University in Denmark and colleagues wrote in the journal Open Heart.

The Danish researchers say the risk is the worst about a week to two after an unexpected loss, and stays at least a little bit high for a year. Overall, people who have had a sudden loss have a 41 percent higher risk of atrial fibrillation, but the risk is close to double the first two weeks after someone dies.

The Danish team measured one well-known effect of sudden loss or shock — a type of irregular heart beat called atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation can cause a stroke or heart failure.

They used Denmark’s detailed medical records system, which keeps track of every health visit. They found 88,000 people who were diagnosed with atrial fibrillation for the first time between 1995 and 2014. Then they compared their circumstances to more than 880,000 healthy people of the same age and circumstances.

Just about 19 percent of both groups lost a spouse or partner over that time. And many people in both groups also developed atrial fibrillation. But it was more likely to happen to someone who just lost a partner — especially if it was something unexpected.

The researchers were able to see what had happened, whether a partner had died of something like AIDS, or a sudden heart attack. Long-lasting illnesses were less likely to send the survivor to the hospital.